The Origins of American Imperialism: An Interview with Stephen Kinzer

Robin
Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney, and the features
editor of the History News Network (hnn.us). His articles have
appeared in HNN, Crosscut, Salon, Real Change, Documentary, Writer’s
Chronicle, Billmoyers.com, Huffington Post, AlterNet, and others. He
has a special interest in the history of conflict and human rights.
His email: robinlindley@gmail.com.

In
1898, the United States won a quick victory in the Spanish American
War and liberated Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam from
Spanish colonial rule. But the war sparked the greatest foreign policy
debate in American history as best minds of the age considered
whether the United States should grab, “civilize,” and dominate
foreign lands or leave the people of those countries to rule
themselves.

Expansionists
led by Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge with the help of news
baron William Randolph Hearst ultimately won the argument then, but a
closely divided nation questioned the new imperialism as influential
thinkers including Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, Jane Addams,
Samuel Gompers, and Andrew Carnegie warned against foreign
intervention and cited the terrible consequences of European empire,
including the brutalizing of colonial subjects.

And
it was a time when the United States forces evolved from liberators
to occupiers who crushed the independence movement in the horrific
Philippine American War (1899-1902), leaving over one hundred
thousand Filipinos dead—mostly civilians—in a conflict fueled by
a sense of American superiority and divine exceptionalism that
presaged our future wars of intervention in Vietnam, Iraq, and
Afghanistan.

Award-winning
foreign correspondent and expert on foreign policy Stephen Kinzer
chronicles this overlooked history in his new book
The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of
American Empire (Henry Holt & Company).
He covers the raging debate in detail over intervention based on
extensive research of official documents, letters, diaries, and other
resources. He stresses how this debate erupted on the role of the
U.S. in the world and dominated news and discussions at the turn of
the twentieth century.

Mr.
Kinzer’s book appears at a time when America is again examining its
role in the world, and the issues argued in this forgotten history
are still relevant today—although these concerns likely will not
garner anywhere near the wide attention they received almost 120
years ago.

The
title of the book, The True Flag,
comes from a speech by prominent anti-imperialist Carl Schurz, a
German immigrant who served as a Union general, U.S. Senator, and
Secretary of the Interior:

Let
us raise the flag of our country—not as an emblem of reckless
adventure and greedy conquest, of betrayed professions and broken
pledges, of criminal aggressions and arbitrary rule over subject
populations—but the old, the true flag, the flag of George
Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the flag of government of, for, and
by the people, the flag of national faith held sacred and of national
honor unsullied, the flag of human rights and of good example to all
nations, the flag of true civilization, peace, and good will to all
men.

In
his study of this period, Mr. Kinzer demonstrates the dangers and
folly of a foreign policy of violent intervention and domination.

Mr.
Kinzer, an award-winning
journalist, worked
as TheNew
York Times’s
bureau chief in Turkey, Germany, and
Nicaragua and as TheBoston
Globe’s Latin
America correspondent. His other
books include The
Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World
War; Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future;
A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It;
Blood of
Brothers: Life and War in Nicaragua;Overthrow:
America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq; All
the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror;
Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds;
andBitter
Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala,
with Stephen Schlesinger. Mr. Kinzer
also serves as a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for
International and Public Affairs at Brown University and writes a
column on world affairs for The
Boston Globe.

Mr. Kinzer talked
about The True
Flag by
telephone from his office in Boston.

Robin
Lindley: You’ve written widely on American foreign policy and
diplomatic history. Now, in The True
Flag, you examine the period of the
Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War. Your book could be
entitled The Origins of American
Imperialism, and you describe the
tremendous debate over expansionist policies then. What sparked this
book now?

Stephen
Kinzer: All American foreign policy questions
can be narrowed down to one sentence and, in fact you could narrow
them down to one word, which is intervention. All of our major
questions in the world now are about where we intervene and for what
purposes and with what means.

We
are the country that intervenes more frequently in more other
countries that are farther away from our own borders than other
countries. Why are we like this? How did we get this way? Where did
it begin? I’ve always been intrigued by these questions. Often we
look for the answers to these questions in the period after World War
II when the U.S. truly became a global empire.

Actually,
when I looked more deeply into the background of those questions, I
saw that the crucial decision was made earlier, in the period around
1898 to 1900. Looking back at that time made it very clear to me how
aware everybody involved was in the debate that would shape the
future of the United States. Everybody debating the issue in 1899 in
the U.S. Senate, for example, understood that he was not debating
only one issue such as whether the U.S. could take the Philippines.
Those senators and other opinion makers across the country, as one
senator called it, were debating the greatest question that had ever
been put before the American people.

In the
history of American foreign policy, I realized this was the formative
debate, the mother of all debates.

Robin
Lindley: Didn’t the imperialist sentiment of this period, in a way,
grow out of the westward continental expansion and the idea of
Manifest Destiny?

Stephen
Kinzer: Yes. I think you can see a continuity
in the history of American expansionism. You could argue that the
United States has been expanding since the Pilgrims landed at
Plymouth Rock.

Perhaps
the history could best be understood as coming in three phases.
First, the United States created a continental empire in North
America by clearing native people and seizing a large part of Mexico.
Then, in the period after 1898, we became an overseas empire. And
then finally, after World War II, a global empire.

When
the Census Bureau in 1890 declared that the American frontier was
closed, that posed a dilemma for the United States. We had been
expanding for so long and, in the 1890’s. there was a sense that we
needed foreign markets for our goods and foreign raw materials. We
had to face this question: What do we do after reaching California?
Once we conquer North America, do we turn inward and do we do
something different and stop trying to conquer other lands? Or do we
continue overseas? That was the essence of this debate.

Robin
Lindley: Your book illuminates this basically overlooked period in
history. Most of us in school probably learned little of the Spanish
American War except for the sinking of the U.S. battleship Maine
in Cuba and Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill. And I think
most Americans probably learn nothing of the brutal war waged by the
U.S. in the Philippines that followed the victory over the Spain
there.

Stephen
Kinzer: I think you’re right, and it’s
another example of how not just Americans but all people like to
remember things that they did or their country did that put them in a
good light.

We
tend to forget episodes that don’t show us in the way that we like
to think that we are. The Philippine War falls in that category. We
left hundreds of thousands of Filipinos dead in a horrifically brutal
campaign. We had our first torture scandal. We had serious war crimes
committed as a matter of official military policy. And yet very few
Americans are even aware that this war ever happened. Actually, it’s
been a huge scar on the minds of Filipinos and it’s well known in
East Asia, but because it doesn’t fit into our narrative of what we
do in the world, we’ve allowed it to fall out of our history books
and our consciousness.

Robin
Lindley: As I recall, this period was sanitized and glorious in our
old schoolbooks. There was the Great White Fleet and a glorious new
American Empire. We didn’t learn that there was an anti-imperialist
movement. Your book is a corrective.

Stephen
Kinzer: I recently photographed a monument in
San Francisco to the veterans of the Spanish American War who were
described in the plaque as having “extended the hand of friendship
to alien people.” That is the narrative that Americans are told
about this period. Our ignorance of what really happened feeds our
puzzlement as to why we are not so beloved in the world. We are part
of the view of our own history, and therefore people are surprised
when people with more direct experience as victims of our foreign
policy don’t look at us the way we look at ourselves.

Robin
Lindley: And that seems to hold true for the general view of Theodore
Roosevelt. He’s remembered as an energetic genius who wrote dozens
of books and was devoted to the environment and progressive domestic
policies. As you point out in your book, however, he was also a
bloodthirsty militarist, a rabid imperialist and a racist when it
came to non-white people in other lands. He was seen as insane by
some detractors, including Mark Twain. I don’t think we usually get
that view of Roosevelt.

Stephen
Kinzer: I had a great deal of fun learning
about the main characters in my book, Mark Twain and Theodore
Roosevelt. I some ways, they’re very different. Theodore Roosevelt
was a spoiled rich kid. He grew up looking at ships from his estate
on Oyster Bay. He became fascinated with navies, as young boys
sometimes do. He traveled to other countries as an aristocrat who got
to know European capitals much more than he got to know anything
about the way most Americans live. He liked to shoot animals. He had
tremendous contempt for people in non-white countries and had no
belief that they could rule themselves.

Mark
Twain was very different. He also traveled widely but not to shoot
animals. He really got to meet people. He had been in places like
India and South Africa where the state of European imperialism was
quite brutally clear. He had great sympathy for the native people
that Roosevelt held in such contempt.

On the
other hand, in some ways they were similar. Roosevelt and Twain were
both prima donnas. They both created an image for themselves and
invented themselves in a way. They were people that could never turn
away from an interview or a mirror. In a sense they epitomized the
vibe of the American soul during this period. Mark Twain believed
that every human being was as good as every other human being and if
the United States could produce people that could rule their country,
then the Philippines and other countries could rule themselves too.
Theodore Roosevelt thought this was nonsense: that people who were
non-white had no way of ruling themselves and needed to be ruled by
others.

We’re
still debating that in our own minds. What do we want to do in the
world? Americans want to guide the world, but we also want every
country to guide itself. These are opposite impulses and we can’t
do both of them. But we still hold them both in our minds and, in a
way, Roosevelt and Twain represent that dichotomy.

Robin
Lindley: They are two complex personalities. I believe that after his
presidency, Roosevelt didn’t even mention the Philippine-American
War in his memoirs. Do you think he was displaying some remorse?

Stephen
Kinzer: Roosevelt had an interesting turn of
mind in the period after he became president. As a vice president and
as governor of New York, he was a forceful advocate of nation
grabbing. He wanted the United States to annex possibly the entire
world. When he became president, it was presumed that this impulse
would guide him. There was speculation that he might take colonies in
Africa or that he might try to join the race for slices of China.
There was the possibility that he would try to take Mexico or
Nicaragua or even Canada.

He
didn’t do any of those things. I think the shock of what happened
in the Philippines must have affected him. I never found an actual
phrase where he and his friend Henry Cabot Lodge said that Americans
would be greeted with flowers in the Philippines, but that was more
or less the opinion that they transmitted to the American people—that
the Philippine people would welcome us. Instead, we had to wage a
horrifically brutal war to subjugate them.

This
sobered Roosevelt. He began to understand the sorrows of empire. When
he became president, he ordered one operation in which he seized land
for the Panama Canal. After that, however, he turned his interest to
other issues. He focused on controlling corporate power and
protecting the natural environment.

I
think he actually fit the pattern for an American president. They
tend to start off with great enthusiasm for using American military
and coercive power around the world. After that, they see the
limitations, they see the blowback, they see the trouble it brings,
so at the end of their terms they’re less likely to intervene than
at the beginning. You see this in presidents from Roosevelt up to
Bush and Obama.

Robin
Lindley: You certainly see that pattern in recent administrations.
And you look back at Roosevelt before the Spanish American war and he
was eager to fight and wanted to see combat, which he did in Cuba. He
was bloodthirsty. He said it was “a great day” when he killed a
Spanish soldier who was apparently running away at San Juan Hill.

Stephen
Kinzer: Roosevelt was a war lover. He had a
fascination with war and believed that war was the only noble pursuit
for a man or for a nation. I found a letter in which he speculated on
the possibility that perhaps Germany could be baited into burning a
few cities on the American East Coast because then we’d finally
have an enemy that would rouse Americans to the necessity of creating
a large military establishment. He wrote about wanting to participate
in fighting against the Tatars in Russia or against the Aborigines in
Australia. He was always looking for enemies and that certainly is a
pattern in American history.

Robin
Lindley: It seems that Roosevelt and his friend Senator Henry Cabot
Lodge were drivers of this imperialist sentiment. And newspaper
magnate William Randolph Hearst supported expansionism and promoted
the war against Spain. That press role strikes a chord today too.

Stephen
Kinzer: The imperialist triumvirate that
drove the United States to succumb to the imperial temptation in 1898
was comprised of three interesting figures.

Teddy
Roosevelt was the public face of the expansionist project. Henry
Cabot Lodge was the Mephistopheles in Washington that organized the
project politically. William Randolph Hearst was the megaphone who
sold Americans a diet of super-patriotic bunkum that drove them
crazy. He understood something that editors understand to this day:
If you want to have people buying newspapers or clicking on your
story, you need a running story that unfolds every day, not just on
one day. War is the best running story of all.

Hearst
set out quite consciously to set the United States off to war to sell
more newspapers. That he did splendidly. Hearst also understood
something that is still true today about how to get Americans to go
to war. He understood that Americans are a very compassion people who
hate the idea of anybody suffering anywhere. Our leaders, therefore,
use our people’s sympathy for the suffering of others. Whenever
they want to go to war for any reason, they start feeding us images
of poor, suffering people being brutalized by some evil tyrant.
That’s enough to move Americans into thinking we need to go to war
in some country.

We
don’t stop to think usually whether we’re going to be able to
improve the situation or what the long-term plan might be, but we’re
very impulsive. And Hearst understood this. He filled his paper with
articles about the brutalization of womanhood and other evils
perpetrated in Cuba, and that created a public climate that allowed
us to go to war. That’s like stories about Khaddaffi and Saddam and
Assad that were heavy news in later years.

Robin
Lindley: How do you see the role of Republican President McKinley at
this time? It seems he was ambivalent about aggressive expansionism
in foreign lands, but he eventually embraced a policy he called
“benevolent assimilation.”

Stephen
Kinzer: McKinley was known as a person who
followed public opinion rather than trying to lead it. The Speaker of
the House, Thomas Reed, famously said that McKinley “kept his ear
so close to the ground, it was full of grasshoppers.”

McKinley
sensed that Americans were caught up in the fever of expansionism and
that to try to put a stop to it or to try to stand in its way would
hurt him and his party politically. He saw that the popular thing to
do would be to latch onto this bandwagon, and he did so. His
explanation was that he was guided by God in a visitation in the
White House one night in October 1898, but that night sounded a lot
like Henry Cabot Lodge and Teddy Roosevelt.

Robin
Lindley: Was it mainly commercial interests that propelled this
imperialist policy? It seems that greed, profit, and the desire of
businesses for new markets played a large role.

Stephen
Kinzer: A confluence of factors drove the
United States to make this epochal decision at the end of the
nineteenth century.

Economics
played a large role. When you read newspapers of that period, as I
did while researching this book, you see that there is much written
about what was then called glut. The argument was that American farms
and factories were becoming so productive that they were producing
more than Americans could consume. This was producing social rifts
with strikes and labor conflict. People began to sense that there was
a need to export some of social problems, and the way to do this
would be to find foreign markets. In those days, that meant you had
to take over foreign territories. That’s the way Europeans did it.
You then would prevent other countries from trading with those
colonies.

The
United States saw the Philippines partly as a source of great raw
materials and as a potential market for goods, but even more
tantalizingly, as a potential springboard to the China market. In
those days, the China market was held up as a great phantasm of
tremendous prospects for wealth. Articles were appearing about how
much cotton the Chinese would buy if they could be induced to make
their clothes of cotton, or how many nails they could buy, or how
much beef they could buy if they converted to American habits.

No
doubt Lodge, in weaving the imperial project together, used the
ambition of commercial interests as an important thread.

Robin
Lindley: It may surprise some readers that so many great minds were
on the anti-imperialist side of the debate: Booker T. Washington,
Jane Addams, Carl Schurz, Mark Twain, and even the richest man in
America, industrialist Andrew Carnegie. The debate was by no means
one-sided and the imperialist impulse was not overwhelming.

Stephen
Kinzer: Actually, the power of the
anti-imperialist movement and the earnestness that many Americans
took its arguments was something that I hadn’t realized. This
episode has essentially fallen out of American history. There was a
great debate that seized America. It was on the front page of every
newspaper day after week after month. Every major political and
intellectual figure in America took sides and it shaped the entire
subsequent history of the United States.

All of
my books are voyages of discovery and, in this book, my main
discovery was that this debate ever happened. It’s a vitally
important episode of American history that shaped who we are today
but has fallen out of our history books. So the greatest satisfaction
for me in writing this book is being able to recover this debate and
hoping to make clear to Americans today who question, as I do,
aspects of American policy. The idea that the United States should
allow other nations to rule themselves and not try to project our
military and coercive power around the world is very deeply rooted in
American history.

Those
of us who are trying to push America to a more prudent and restrained
foreign policy are standing on the shoulders of titans—great
figures of American history who first enunciated the view and to
continue to make their argument is something quintessentially
American.

Robin
Lindley: To go back, our brutal Philippines campaign is shocking
today. Apparently, the leader of the independence movement there,
Emilio Aguinaldo, had a promise from the U. S. that, if his forces
fought with the U.S. against the Spanish, the U.S. would assure
Philippines independence. Instead, after liberating the Philippines
from the Spanish with the helped of Aguinaldo’s forces, the U.S.
turned on Aguinaldo and his “insurgents” in a horrific war.

Stephen
Kinzer: The Americans were told that
Filipinos has every reason to rebel against Spanish rule. After all,
being portrayed as under a cruel Spanish master, Filipinos in
rebellion seemed to us the equivalent of George Washington and the
Continental Army fighting to overthrow British. Then, after we
changed our ideas about what we wanted to do with the Philippines and
decided we wanted to take the Philippines rather than grant them
independence, we began to tell ourselves that we were a very
different master from the Spanish.

You
certainly can understand why the Filipinos wouldn’t want to be
ruled by the Spanish because they were brutal and oppressive and far
away and had evil intentions. We were told Filipinos would love to be
ruled by Americans. They would realize Americans are benevolent and
only want to help.

Americans
were never able to grasp the idea that, for many Filipinos, being
ruled by a foreign power was [anathema] no matter what power it was.
These Filipino rebels were not willing to accept the exchange of one
distant master for another. They wanted full independence. Americans
were never able to see this. We deluded ourselves into believing
that, although they hated being ruled by the Spanish, they would love
being ruled by the Americans. This is the kind of self-delusion that
characterized much of our approach to the world.

Robin
Lindley: Racism also played a role in these interventions.
Imperialists not only saw the U.S. mission as liberating Cuba and the
Philippines, but they saw non-white people as inferior and primitive
creatures who needed us to “civilize” them. Roosevelt called
Filipinos “wild beasts.”

Stephen
Kinzer: It was particularly vivid in Cuba. We
were told when we entered the war there that the Cuban patriots were
great heroes and the equivalent of the leaders of our American
Revolution. They were lionized in the American press. That’s why we
felt they should have the independence they were fighting for.

Then,
after the war ended, our commanders in Cuba reported back the
horrible realization that many of these leaders that we had been
taught to admire was that they were black. That suddenly changed
American opinion. We began to think that there might be a government
in Cuba that would be partly black, and that certainly would have
happened if we allowed Cuba to become independent.

Our
racial attitudes at that time made it absolutely impossible for us to
accept that result. That’s one reason that the United States
refused to permit Cuba to become independent after 1898.

Robin
Lindley: It’s interesting that some white supremacists were
anti-imperialist because they were worried that we would bring more
non-white, less-than-civilized immigrants into the United States.

Stephen
Kinzer: You’re right. Racism was used on
both sides of this argument. It’s easy to understand how
imperialists viewed it because they believed that non-white people
couldn’t govern themselves and needed white people’s help. But
some anti-imperialists also were racist. They came from the south and
they didn’t want the United States taking in people who were not
white.

I do
think that racial attitudes played a big role in this debate. Another
example is the experience of Hawaii. Hawaii, with the connivance of
the United States government, had a change of regime in 1893. A group
of white American planters and their friends overthrew the Hawaiian
government so that they could come into the United States and sell
their sugar at a cheaper rate. But there was a change of
administration in Washington. Grover Cleveland became president and
he didn’t want to take in Hawaii under these conditions.

Hawaii
had to become an independent nation—something these white settlers
had never imagined. Their challenge was to find themselves a
constitution which would look good to Americans in case they ever
became a part of the U.S., but also would disenfranchise most of the
population. They couldn’t have native people voting; otherwise
they’d be voted out of office. They chose as their model the
constitution of the state of Mississippi, which was ingeniously drawn
up with all sorts of qualifications for voting so that it looked
democratic while denying most people the vote. So you can say that
the racism that permeated the United States definitely shaped our
foreign.

Robin
Lindley: Thanks for your insights on the role of race. I appreciate
your comment on intervention in the book: “Violent intervention in
other countries always produces unintended consequences.” That is
writ large in the period you examine and in our foreign policy in the
past two decades that has produced terrible blowback.

Stephen
Kinzer: I think you’re right that our
interventions have produced terrible unintended consequences. What I
find even more puzzling is that we don’t seem to learn from these
experiences. There doesn’t seem to be any limit to the number of
times we can crash into another country violently and have it come
out terribly until we begin to reassess whether this is a good idea
or not.

One
reason I was so interested to write this book The
True Flag is that I envy the debate they had
in those days when the U.S. Senate convened for an epochal 32-day
debate for this vital question of expansionism in the winter of 1899.
Senators debated this great question: Should the United States try to
push its power onto other people and other countries or how do we
leave them alone and build up our own country?

We
don’t have that debate today. We’re debating whether to send four
thousand troops to Afghanistan for the new surge or should it be six
thousand. We never pull back to have this larger debate and, if we
ever did, it would probably sound a lot like debates that I write
about in my book.

Robin
Lindley: You have a wealth of good advice for the new administration.
In a speech on July 6 in Warsaw, Trump asked if the West has the will
to survive? What do you think of that remark from our new president.

Stephen
Kinzer: The West has the will to survive, but
do we could survive without trying to impose our will on others? The
more we crash into other countries, the more we weaken ourselves.
This is the lesson our interventions teach us. We can survive and
thrive but we should pay more attention to building our own nation
than trying to use our thousand-mile screwdriver to fix others. How’s
that for a coda?

Robin
Lindley: That’s quite fitting. At the close of The
True Flag you go back to the words of
George Washington. Your book reveals the wisdom of Washington’s
warning to Americans: to avoid the “mischiefs of foreign
intrigues.” Thank you for your thoughtful comments and your
illuminating new book.